There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.

Even in this nuclear thing, [ Donald Trump] says we should be stronger and expand. What does that mean? So, what is concrete in what he's saying?

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

There was this famous clash of civilization thesis from Samuel Huntington, a political theorist. And the idea was that Western civilization is at war with Islam and maybe some of the other civilizations around the world. And I don't agree with that. But I do think there is such a thing as Western civilization. I think it starts with the Greeks and the Romans. Then it goes through the Enlightenment - or the Reformation, the Enlightenment. It goes through the scientific age. And it somewhat defines some of the cultures and mores of Europe and North America and some other countries.